As a first reaction, young-Earth creationists
will recoil at the suggestion that their tightly-held literal interpretation
of the book of Genesis is a heresy. After all, who more strongly supports the
Bible and all that is therein? But let us examine several lines of logic and
see where they lead. First, we need to set a ground rule as to whether or not
God is responsible for the Earth as we know it. The question is, "Did God make
this world or didn't He?" If He didn't then He didn't and there's nothing to
be done about it. Christians will undoubtedly answer that, yes, God did create
the world.

Well and good, but that leads us to a new
understanding. As we learn more and more about the Earth, are we not learning
about how God created the Earth? The processes we find to have operated to
cause the world around us are in actuality a reflection of God's hand.

Young Earth creationists believe that the Earth
is no more than about 10,000 years old. There are, however, very many reasons
for not believing that. We will discuss three here.

Radioactive Isotope Abundances: The first line of evidence
refers to the abundance of radioactive isotopes on Earth. Radioactive isotopes
decay at a constant rate. Half of every isotope will decay into a new isotope
in a fixed period of time known as the half-life. After the passage of a
certain number of half-lives, the isotope in question will have decayed to a
point where it is no longer detectable. Let us set 20 half-lives as a limit
beyond which the isotope in question is not detectable. The amount remaining
then would be 1/220 or 1 part in 1,048,576, or only 0.000095% of the original.

This rate of decay may be very fast, as in the case of
Magnesium 23. Half of it decays every 11.9 seconds, so in only 238 seconds or
3 minutes and 58 seconds, 20 half-lives have passed.

Let us examine Thorium 229, which has a half-life of 7,340
years. Creationists who believe that the Earth was created just 10,000 years
ago would expect that there would be plenty of Thorium 229 on Earth since only
a little over one half-life has passed. However, upon checking what isotopes
are naturally present on Earth, we find Thorium 229 to be absent.

Investigating another isotope, Potassium 40, we findthat it requires about 1.4 X 109 (one
billion, 400 million) years for one-half of it to decay. If we again check to
see what isotopes are naturally occurring on Earth, we do find Potassium 40
present.

We can learn much by examining which isotopes are naturally
occurring. Geochemistry and common sense tells us that the very short-lived
isotopes will not be found on Earth. There are very many isotopes, but most
have half-lives in the order of seconds or
minutes. Let us examine the isotopes with a half-life of one million years or
longer and see where this leads us.

Table 1—Nuclides present
listed by half-life1

1Dalrymple,
1991.

"Yes" indicates that an isotope is found in
some quantity in nature. "Yes-P" indicates that the isotope is present, but it
is produced by the decay of another, longer-lived isotope.

Ignoring the isotopes that are naturally
produced and examining those that are left, we find something interesting
between Plutonium 244, with a half-life of 82 million years, and Samarium 146,
with a half-life of 70 million years. All the isotopes with a half-life as
long or longer than Plutonium 244 are present and all those with a half-life
shorter than that are absent - every one of them.

As Plutonium 244 is on the line of not being
present in nature, hereis
an interesting bit of information about an analysis that found it.

There is a very good reason for this and it is
the same reason that we do not expect to find either Magnesium 23 or Thorium
229 on Earth. A long enough period of time in the Earth's history has passed
for them to have decayed away to nothing. Some may contend that the absent
isotopes were never created in the first place. Did God create a group
of isotopes based solely on their half-lives? Had the Earth been created just
10,000 years ago, we would expect to see many, many additional isotopes on
Earth than we do. But they're not there. This leads us back to the point of
this paper. God neither lies nor does He put false clues under our feet. The
inescapable reason that there is this line between those isotopes that are
present and those that are not is that the shorter-lived isotopes have had
enough time (4.54 billion years) to decay away.

The Hawaiian Islands and Plate Tectonics:
For our second line of evidence, let us journey to
the Hawaiian Islands. As you know the volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii is
active, very active. In just a dozen or so years it has added approximately
500 acres of land to the island (Tominaga, 2000). The Big Island of Hawaii is
actually a composite of five volcanoes: Hualalai, Kohala, Mauna Kea, and the
active Mauna Loa and Kilauea. These have built what is the tallest mountain on
Earth when measured from the ocean floor. The volume of just Mauna Loa is a
startling 10,000 cubic miles.

The Hawaiian Islands are older as you proceed
west from the Big Island toward Niihau, the westernmost. Beyond that are
several atolls extending to Midway, where the volcanic rocks have eroded below
sea level, but a growth of coral on the volcano maintains it above sea level
for now. The Theory of Plate Tectonics explains that the islands have formed
one after another as the Pacific Plate moved slowly westward conveyor-belt
fashion over the hotspot.

Not only were the islands formed in this
fashion, but also a long line of subsurface
seamounts extending all the way to the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia. These
form a straight line demonstrating their interrelatedness. See

The rocks on the islands, atolls and seamounts
have been dated, and the distance of the islands/atolls/seamounts from Kilauea
has been measured. The data are available at
Hawai'i-Emperor Chain.

Table 2—Age and distance of islands/seamounts from
Kilauea Caldera

Let's plot these data and see what they look like.

Comparison of ages of islands/seamounts to distance from
Kilauea

Fig. 1. Comparison of ages of islands/seamounts to
distance from Kilauea.

It's a straight line, isn't it. That means something.

Did you notice the r2 =.9833? That's the statistical confidence factor, which means that there is a greater
than 98% chance that the data correlate. It means that the Pacific Plate is
steadily moving westward across the hotspot at the blinding speed of 8
cm/year - or about three times as fast as your fingernails grow. If either
radiometric dating or the Theory of Plate Tectonics were false, the graph
would be a scatter of points with no correlation, and the maps of the
islands/seamounts would not be arranged in a line. They're not
false.The data fairly shout to
us that this process, which we can see in action on the Big Island, has been
taking place for at least 65 million years.

It would be good if we could find the same process of plate
movement in action somewhere else on Earth. Well, we can - in the Atlantic
Ocean. In the late 1960s, the ship Glomar Challengerwas used to
drill a number of holes in the floor of the Atlantic Ocean from the
Mid-Oceanic Ridge to the margins of the basin. The age of the samples
recovered shows that the youngest rocks are on the ridge, where, in fact, they
are being formed daily, and the oldest are on the margins. The ages there show
that the ocean opened in Jurassic time (180
million years ago). Dividing the distance by the number of years, we again
find that the plates are moving at about 5 cm per year. With the advent of
Global Positioning System (GPS), the distance between points on both sides of
the ocean can be very accurately determined. Measurements over several years
show that the seafloor of the Atlantic is spreading at the same rate as
determined from the seafloor samples, validating at once the Theory of Plate
Tectonics and radiometric dating.

Varves and Carbon 14: The last line of evidence to be
addressed concerns claims by young-Earth creationists that annually deposited
sediments known as varves do not reflect an annual mode of deposition, and
that radiometric dating using Carbon-14 is invalid. A paper by Kitagawa and van der Plicht (1998), provided a way to cross-check the two dating methods by
comparing dates determined by both methods. It concerned Lake Suigetsu in
Japan, which deposits dark-colored clay year-round and white layers resulting
from the growth of diatoms in the spring. The authors took cores of the soft
lake bed sediments and carefully counted the 1 mm-thick layers. 250 samples of
the organic-rich material in the cores were dated using carbon-14. The graph
was merged with data from tree-ring dates correlated with carbon-14 age
determinations extending from the present back to 11,000 years. As can be
plainly seen in the graph -

The results show clearly that there is
practically a one to one correlation between the dates determined by counting
the varves and the ages determined using carbon-14, thereby validating both
methods.

It is interesting to note at this point that a
paper was printed in the Creation Research Society Quarterly,
the creationist's own journal (Aardsma, 1993) that showed that tree rings only
grew one ring a year refuting the creationist's own apologetic that the trees
must have grown multiple rings per year to match their perception of the
Earth's age. Aardsma concluded that "it seems that the Flood must have
occurred more than 10,000 years ago". For this honest disclosure, Aardsma left
his position at the Institute for Creation Research under a cloud.

Conclusion: When
confronted with three solid reasons why the Earth is old, young-Earth
creationists will say "That's just how God made it", but therein lies a
problem - a very big problem. If the Earth was, indeed, made in a single,
supernatural act 10,000 years ago, then God, for some reason, left behind
as part of the record of His creation these
isotopic abundances, measurable rates of the movement of the Pacific and
Atlantic Plates, and two valid methods of age determination, all of which
show beyond any doubt that it was not created in a supernatural act some
10,000 years ago.

Ask yourself, "Why would God leave evidence
that speaks against the actual record?" We may say that God can do things in
anyway that He desires. God chose to be self-limiting. He is the God of order
and laws such as gravity. God is good, just and truthful. This allows humans
to trust a world that makes sense.

The final determination that must be made is
that the record of nature, being God's record, is trustworthy as God has
chosen not to lie to us. To say that He would lie would impart a most profound
deviousness to God, which would be heresy. Therefore the only possible
conclusion we can reach is that the Earth is old - very old.

All the "appearance of age" arguments made by
young-Earth creationists to try to explain away the evidences of an old Earth
are equally heretical. God did not put false clues under our feet to trick us.
He gave us clues to show us His true creation and the way He did it. If God
took 4.5 billion years to create the Earth, then so be it. It is far more in
line with a firm faith to believe in a God-created old Earth than to believe
that a devious god is trying to trick us into not
believing in a supernatural creation.

A creationist in a pretrial deposition before
the McLean vs. Arkansas trial in 1981 questioning the legality of Arkansas Act
590, exposed their own heretical views of the Creator with the following
statement from pages 186-87 of the
trial transcript:

As used in the context of creation-science as defined by
Section 4 of Act 590, the terms or concepts of "creation" and "creator" are
not inherently religious terms or concepts. In this sense, the term
"creator" means only some entity with power, intelligence and a sense of
design. Creation science does not require a creator who has a personality,
who has the attributes of love, compassion, justice and so on which are
ordinarily attributed to a deity. Indeed, the creation-science model does
not require that the creator still be in existence.

One can scarcely imagine a more dispassionate
faith statement by people who claim to be Christians. The Creator God the
young-Earth creationists present would be a capricious, disposable, uncaring,
unloving and probably dead god.

To conclude, we have examined the young-Earth
creationist views of the age of the Earth and read their own view of the
Creator. In both cases the paradigm of "Young-Earth Creationism" has been
found to be based on a most outrageous heretical theology and must be rejected
by persons of faith.